Costco Connection - February 2011

OUR DVD PICKS for February are all about awards. These recent movies have already garnered various film festival and critics’ awards (you’ll also find a few past Academy Award winners on page 66). Some may make you laugh or cry or perch on the edge of your seat, but they’ll all inspire you.

—Stacy Thrailkill, media buyer

SONY PICTURES

STRANGELY, TRAILERS MADE Get Low look like a comedy, but, while it has amusing moments, it is actually a very poignant and sweet, fact-based Depression-era drama. Felix Bush, an old hermit, winningly played by Robert Duvall, ventures from his backwoods hideout to the small town nearby with one goal: to arrange his own funeral … while he’s still alive … so he can hear what people say about him. Why he wants to do it is anyone’s guess, although, as the opening sequence suggests, it might have to do with the event that turned him away from civilization.

Director Aaron Schneider says, “I like to call it the kind of story your grandfather would tell you around the fire. You have to cozy up to it.” He adds that to cozy up to any movie, “You have to really feel for the people on-screen.” Duvall, Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek and Lucas Black lead a solid cast in an exquisitely shot and moving period piece that will indeed make you feel. PG- 13. (Street date 2/14)

Get Low
Waiting for “Superman”

Also available are Burlesque (PG- 13, 2/22), Conviction (R), Red (PG- 13), Secretariat (PG), The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (R) and Unstoppable (PG- 13, 2/15). (Street dates and titles are subject to change.)

THIS LITTLE FILM has a big draw, and has already garnered numerous awards and nominations, as well as critical buzz. In his online Movie Guide (www.leonard maltin.com), film critic and historian Leonard Maltin called it “the movie I’m most eager to spread the word about.” Based on a novel by Daniel Woodrell, and featuring standout performances, it tells the story of a 17-year-old Ozarks girl, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), who tries to track down her drug-dealing father, who disappeared after putting the family’s Winter’s Bone

house up for bail. If she can’t find him before a certain date, the house will be forfeited and the family kicked out. Ree has to navigate between the law and outlaw relatives who would rather she didn’t discover the truth, whatever it is. Maltin calls it “grimly fascinating” and cautions, “Winter’s Bone is not for the fainthearted but it’s awfully well done.” R.